A popular way to increase both revenue and average order value is to offer up-sells and cross-sells in Zen Cart. What is an up-sell or a cross-sell?

Up-sell: is a sales technique whereby a seller induces the customer to purchase more expensive items, upgrades or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale. While it usually involves marketing more profitable services or products, it can be simply exposing the customer to other options that were perhaps not considered. -Wikipedia

Cross-sell: is a marketing term for the practice of suggesting related products or services to a customer who is considering buying something. – whatis.com

Simply put, these are ways to entice your customers to buy more product from you. This is done by displaying these other products to your customers as they shop. The key is to do it in a way that benefits your customer. A list of products without some connection or benefit will not achieve this goal. It will distract and confuse your shopper and they’ll be more likely to not buy anything.

The goal is to offer additional products in a way that is helpful. For example, display batteries along side a toy that requires batteries. What you’ve done is offered something your customer needs at the time they need it. This is when they are most likely to buy.

There are a number different ways to go about offering up-sells and cross-sells in Zen Cart. For starters, Zen Cart will automatically display cross-sells. It creates these based upon actual order history. If a customer buy product A and product B together, it will start to show Product A on Product B’s page, and vis versa, under a section called ‘Customers who bought this item also bought…’. This is great because it requires no input from you and is based upon real customer data.

If you want something you can customize, there are several different plugins available that allow for all sorts of discounts. Better Together is one of the most popular. It is a version of the basic BOGO (Buy One, Get One) discount model.

You can specify:

Buy item X, get item Y at a discount.

Buy item X, get an item from category A at a discount.

Buy an item from category A, get an item from category B at a discount.

Buy an item from category A, get item X at a discount.

You may also specify cross-sells for any of these variants. Cross sells are the same pairings but without a discount.

The key is to find and create these up-sells and cross-sells that benefit your customers.

If they like them, it’s the proverbial win-win. You get increased revenue and your customers get more of what they want and need conveniently and quickly.

If you know your products and customers well, many of these matches should be quick to figure out. If not, spend some time looking at order history and customer behavior. You may find you can increase both revenue and average order value in short order.

If you are not offering up-sells and cross-sells, please Contact Us to find out how you can start.

The free SSL is provided by Let’s Encrypt and is a Domain Validated certificate. See our SSL FAQ for details on this. Once installed on your hosting account, your Zen Cart or WordPress will need to be configured to actually use the SSL. Just because it’s installed doesn’t mean it will be used. Contact Us for help.

The server will then check each day for the SSL status. It will automatically replace it with a new SSL before it expires. It’s easy to forget to do this and a site set to use an SSL will give all kinds of warnings and sometimes stop working if it expires. We’ve had clients who had their own SSL’s expire and urgently need to get their site back online. Now you don’t have to worry about it.

We continue to make hosting something you don’t need to think about. We update and maintain your hosting environment so you can focus on growing your business. A free SSL is one more example of this.

There are MANY factors that affect the way your website pages rank. Many of those are outside of your direct control. For this reason, it’s so important to take full advantage of the factors you can control.

One of the ranking factors is page speed. How quickly does you website load for a visitor? Visitors want them to load fast. If it’s too slow, they will simply leave your site and go someplace else. This is why Google ranks faster sites higher than slower sites, it’s a better user experience.

Some of the factors affecting site speed are your website platform, hosting company, hosting plan and template design. Changes to any of these are not so simple and involve significant business processes.

That’s the beauty of a caching plugin.

A caching plugin works on top of all of these items. It doesn’t much care about these details. It will do it’s job regardless. So what is it’s job?

The way caching plugins work is by saving the dynamically generated pages and serving them from a saved copy, the cache, whenever a page is requested, rather than loading all of the website scripts and running database queries every time a page is viewed.

This is much faster for the visitor, reducing page load times, improving the customer experience and helping to increase your page ranking. The W3 Total Cache plugin is one of the most popular for WordPress.

W3 Total Cache is simple to install.

One of it’s biggest advantages is the level of customization if offers. There are twelve tabs on the settings page. This allows us to tweak the settings for your store to achieve the best results. Each site is a little different with different customizations, themes and plugins. Each hosting environment is a bit different. These differences mean the right settings for someone else may not be ideal for you. This is were having a professional install and configure it for you can be well worth the investment.

If you’re looking to improve your site…better user experience and better rankings…contact us to install and configure W3 Total Cache for your WordPress site.

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E-Commerce Experts

Wheaton Website Services are specialists in e-commerce websites for small businesses. We build, fix and host e-commerce websites such as Zen Cart. You can rely on us to keep your website running flawlessly for your customers

We ensure your site is technically designed, built and maintained to always be ready for the sale.